From the valuts: Monterey to preserve recordings

I read something from Tim Jackson (head honcho at the MJF) recently talking about these plans, the grant the got from the Grammy Foundation, and the possibility of starting a MJF record label. Given the continued strong market for jazz reissues, if the legal hurdles can be cleared (and they may be rather tough to clear) it would be a no brainer.
-Joe
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New life for old jazz tapes
Festival gets archive grant

By BETTINA ADRAGNA
Monterey County Herald Correspondent

Recordings of live performances by Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and others at the Monterey Jazz Festival are in danger of deteriorating.

To help preserve these recordings and others from 1958 to 1969, the Grammy Foundation has given the jazz festival a $40,000 grant for its Archive Preservation Project to digitally reformat and catalog the archives, in partnership with Stanford University.

The digitized recordings will be put in an online database so that scholars can access them more easily, said Jason Arnold, marketing associate for the jazz festival.

The earlier tapes are in "troubling" condition, he said. "They've been deteriorating for quite awhile, so we want to make sure they're well preserved and taken care of so that people can listen to them and hear them in the best possible quality... Once everything is digitized, it'll be much easier to access and to manage."

The inspiration for the project comes as the jazz festival approaches its 50th anniversary in 2008, said General Manager Tim Jackson.

"We realized that we need to preserve old media... Sooner or later, that tape is just going to disintegrate." Currently, the archives are stored on various media, from quarter-inch reel-to-reel tapes to CDs.

Read the complete article here...